A Contest I Will Be Entering

This is something I've done in the security lines at airports for the last few years.

And, btw, if you're in the "this kind of thing only gives the terrorist ideas/knowing about the secret wiretap program only aids the terrorists" camp, I suggest you stick you head back in the sand for the duration. It's only through these exercises and through transparency that we improve security.

Announcing: Movie-Plot Threat Contest
NOTE: If you have a blog, please spread the word.

For a while now, I have been writing about our penchant for "movie-plot threats": terrorist fears based on very specific attack scenarios. Terrorists with crop dusters, terrorists exploding baby carriages in subways, terrorists filling school buses with explosives -- these are all movie-plot threats. They're good for scaring people, but it's just silly to build national security policy around them.

But if we're going to worry about unlikely attacks, why can't they be exciting and innovative ones? If Americans are going to be scared, shouldn't they be scared of things that are really scary? "Blowing up the Super Bowl" is a movie plot to be sure, but it's not a very good movie. Let's kick this up a notch.

It is in this spirit I announce the (possibly First) Movie-Plot Threat Contest. Entrants are invited to submit the most unlikely, yet still plausible, terrorist attack scenarios they can come up with.
Your goal: cause terror. Make the American people notice. Inflict lasting damage on the U.S. economy. Change the political landscape, or the culture. The more grandiose the goal, the better.
Assume an attacker profile on the order of 9/11: 20 to 30 unskilled people, and about $500,000 with which to buy skills, equipment, etc.
Post your movie plots here on this blog.

Judging will be by me, swayed by popular acclaim in the blog comments section. The prize will be an autographed copy of Beyond Fear. And if I can swing it, a phone call with a real live movie producer.

Entries close at the end of the month -- April 30 -- so Crypto-Gram readers can also play.
This is not an April Fool's joke, although it's in the spirit of the season. The purpose of this contest is absurd humor, but I hope it also makes a point. Terrorism is a real threat, but we're not any safer through security measures that require us to correctly guess what the terrorists are going to do next.
Good luck.

McSweeney's Reviews of Food

'casue nothing is more amusing than reviews of food.

An Exerpt:

Kellogg's S'mores Pop-Tarts
Submitted by Marshall Norton Jr.
She shoved me under her bed and told me not to move. Her father had gotten home earlier than expected. As the minutes passed, I inventoried the various pieces of dirty laundry and discarded plates under her bed with me.
A little later, her face appeared, upside-down. "They're leaving soon. I'll come back when they're gone. Here, have some," she said, offering me a piece of the Pop-Tart she'd brought up on a plate. I thought it best not to ask about the other plates for the moment.

7-Hour Standoff Ends; Police Discover Nobody In Home

Would that I could make shit like this up.

OKLAHOMA CITY -- A police standoff ended early Tuesday with metro police discovering there was nobody in the house they were monitoring.
A seven-hour standoff near Southeast 59th Street and Bryant Avenue started as a drug investigation of a home in the area. Officers said they were worried about activity in the house, and they called for a tactical team. (emp.mine-Ed)
For hours, according to reports, they tried to make contact with anybody in the house.
At about 3:30 a.m., agents approached the house but found nobody inside. A search of the area did not turn up any culprits; however, agents remain in the area looking for leads.


(via)

They stayed looking for leads but it turned out the stake-out operation was actually the operations office of the Cheney for President 2008.

L

What could be more delicious?

Field corespondent Tara continues to earn the hefty salary I'm not paying her.






According to a spokesperson from Just Born -- the company that manufactures Peeps -- one billion of these squishy, marshmallow delights will fly off the shelves in the weeks leading up to Easter.
Why Peeps for Easter? The tradition dates back further than company history -- way back. Ancient pagans in Europe used eggs, chicks and rabbits as symbols of renewal in their spring rituals. Over time, European Christians incorporated the pagan symbols into their Easter traditions, and brought them to America.

(via)

A Race to The Bottom...

I'm not sure which is worse, lawyers or insurance companies. I received this today:

A Charlotte, NC lawyer purchased a box of very rare and expensive cigars, and then insured them against fire, among other things.

Within a month, having smoked his entire stockpile of these great cigars and without yet having made even his first premium payment on the policy, the lawyer filed claim against the insurance company.

In his claim, the lawyer stated the cigars were lost in a series of small fires. The insurance company refused to pay, citing the obvious reason that the man had consumed the cigars in the normal fashion.

The lawyer sued... and WON! (Stay with me) In delivering the ruling,thejudge agreed with the insurance company that the claim was frivolous.

The judge stated nevertheless, that the lawyer "held a policy from the company in which it had warranted that the cigars were insurable andalso guaranteed that it would insure them against fire, without defining what is considered to be unacceptable fire" and was obligated to pay the claim.

Rather than endure a lengthy and costly appeal process, the insurance company accepted the ruling and paid $15,000 to the lawyer for his loss of the rare cigars lost in the "fires".

NOW FOR THE BEST PART...

After the lawyer cashed the check, the insurance company had himarrested on 24 counts of ARSON!!!

With his own insurance claim and testimony from the previous case being used against him, the lawyer was convicted of intentionally burning his insured property and was sentenced to 24 months in jail and a $24,000 fine.
This is a true story and was the First Place winner in the recent Criminal Lawyers Award Contest

Obviously an Urban Legend, but a good one.

Young Frankenstein Musical Due

From Sci-Fi Weekly. It's not going to be The Producers...

Mel Brooks, who made a monster hit musical out of his 1968 movie The Producers, is adapting his classic 1974 film Young Frankenstein for the musical stage as well, the Reuters news service reported. With no deadline set, Brooks told the news service that he is in the middle of writing the score, including a song for scary Frau Blucher, played in the original movie by Cloris Leachman. When the musical is completed, Brooks says he will make a formal announcement to raise money. Brooks offered Reuters a preview of Frau Blucher's song: "He vus my boyfriend/He vould come home in a snit/He vould have a terrible fit/I am the first thing he vould hit/But I didn't give a s--t/He vus my boyfriend." When he made Young Frankenstein, Brooks said he did everything he could to emulate the 1930s James Whale movie Frankenstein, from shooting the whole film in black and white to using many of the same shots. Now Brooks said that his challenge is to do the musical on Broadway with a black-and-white set, with all the mists, moodiness and laughs of the original movie, plus songs.

Spinning Wheel, Got to Go 'Round

There are 6 currently unclassified methods for enriching Uranium, each more technically challenging than the previous, with *tiny* increases in production.

Slate has a really good article on the basic physics of what's going on in Iran around their enrichment program.

When uranium gas enters the tube and whips around at high speeds, the useful U-235 isotopes get separated out from their heavier cousins, the U-238 isotopes. The speed of the rotor determines how effectively a centrifuge can enrich uranium, and a rotor's maximum speed depends in part on the dimensions of the centrifuge. Since it's hard to maintain a balanced spin in a long tube, engineers have to keep the devices to less than a few meters in length. That means they can enrich only a few grams of material at a time.

Even those few grams need lots of trips through the centrifuge to reach the weapons-grade level. (For more on how enrichment actually works, click here.) Enrichment plants get the job done by connecting hundreds of small centrifuges together, in clusters called "cascades." The uranium gas enters one centrifuge after another, with the enriched gas that comes out of the first getting siphoned off and directed into the next. By routing the enriched product back through the cluster of centrifuges over and over again, you can keep increasing its U-235 content. Given enough time—and enough spins—you'll reach the 3 to 5 percent concentration you need to run a light-water reactor, or the 80 to 90 percent you need to make a nuclear weapon.

Blogging as Narcissism

One of the reasons I took a little blogging break (besides needing to spend time getting my City Of Heros character BluShield to level 50) was because I found my posts getting smaller, pettier and less and less interesting to people in general. I looked at all the stuff I had blogged and tried to see where it was going wrong. After sorting through 2 years worth of good and bad, I made some new rules for what gets posted and how often. In restarting the blog, I decided to highlight the:

Amusing
Entertaining
Transmundane
Weird
Interesting
Science
Father vs. Son conversations

I decided I would only lightly blog about the:
Political
Religious
Personal Medical problems

and I would try to studiously avoid:
what I had for breakfast/lunch/dinner
how much weight I lifted and when
where I was going and who I met (unless it really fell into one of the top categories)
dreams I had
personal information about me, my family etc.
the Iraq War
the president
why other, actually famous bloggers are off their collective rockers and how they should Listen To Me
any diatribe unlikely to be seen by the person I am ranting about (e.g. Ann Coulter, Bill O'Rielly, Travis)

In short, I decided that blogging was an act of narcissism but that even my ego had limits which should be respected.

Why go through explaining all this?

A great example of why I think I was on to something came up today:(via Pharnygula)

You may have heard the disturbing news story about the Oklahoma murderer/pedophile/cannibal—just to make it a little creepier, he had a blog. (I don't expect it will stay up for too long, so read The Insomnia Report for excerpts.)
He says things like this:

I mean it, I really need a girlfriend. It's not just depressing anymore, it's actually starting to have a negative effect on my mental state I think. For example, my fantasies are just getting weirder and weirder. Dangerously weird. If people knew the kinds of things I think about anymore, I'd probably be locked away. No probably about it, I know I would be.

Mostly, though, he comes off as pathetic and banal.

After the *dancing*, Orz think you will make good *special sauce*

It seems there might be a new version of Star Control II in the works!

Pluvius writes "A recent post on GameSpot's Rumor Control blog suggests that there may be a chance for a new entry in the classic Star Control series in the foreseeable future. It would be developed by Toys for Bob, the creator of the first two games in the series, and it is implied that the company already holds the rights for the franchise. Quoting from the article: 'But maybe, just maybe, if enough of you people out there send [Alex Ness, producer] e-mails requesting that Toys For Bob do a legitimate sequel to Star Control 2, I'll be able to show them to [Toys For Bob parent company] Activision, along with a loaded handgun, and they will finally be convinced to roll the dice on this thing.'

For those of you who are now asking yourselves, "Why do I care about this? What the hell is Star Control II and why do I even read Horvath's blog anymore?", this is good news.

Star Control II was one of the finest (and first) computer games ever made. Rich in content, cutting edge (at the time) in graphics, it was a wonderful blend of all the elements of a superlative game. Ask any game player of a certain generation (current ages 20-45) and they will tell you Star Control II is the gold standard by which all other games are measured. And, surprisingly, many modern games fail to reach this standard set in the90s. It was a good blend of a non-linear story, exploration, graphics and playability that's really hard to achieve.

Wiki entry here

Update: Found this in the Wiki entry. I didn't realize this, but it makes perfect sense and is obvious in retrospect. No wonder I like David so much.

David Brin's science fiction series about the Uplift Universe is also often mentioned as inspiration for the Star Control II universe.

Peeps!

What would Easter be without Peeps??!?? Slower, less colorful and filled with fewer diabetic children to start, but why wish for the impossible?

Every year I send some Peeps, usually 40-50lbs worth, to Geoff's mother? Why? Is it because she loves them so much, or becuase I'm a heartless bastard who doesn't know when to quit a joke? You choose, it's all good. Oh how she loves her peeps! But appearently not as much as the folks at the Peep Research Foundation, who have been experimenting with peeps for years and have reached some interesting conclusions with their data.

How People See Your House

Ok, the last posting was was too serious.

This however, while serious, is also mildly amusing.

Fetal Pain

A squirmy, unpleastent question: Can a fetus feel pain?

To my surprise, the answer is, no at least not for until the third trimester.

The thalamus, now, is a relatively low-level structure, the posterior part of the forebrain. To put it simply, it's a kind of relay station that integrates information from multiple sensory modalities and forwards that on to the higher brain centers of the cortex, that stuff that we think of as more significant in generating conscious thought. It's just not where the action is at. Also, at this early stage, the thalamus has not yet sorted out its structure and doesn't have the capacity for much processing. Neither does the cortex; the next important step is for these tissues to organize themselves into layered structures, and for the thalamus to send projections to the cortex. This doesn't happen until the embryo is 23-25 weeks old. That date represents a minimal, rock bottom bare essential level for the presence of any connections that would confer even a remote possibility of sensory function.

After that the answer is less clear. Do you feel pain under anesthetic? Possibly, but you aren't conscience. Does that hold for a third trimester fetus? Possibily, possibly not.

Good question and a good analysis.

Frozen Underwear and Other Parodies

This was over at Something Awful, but picked up by Wonkette.

Odd and just short of amusing (unless you're like totally a 14 year-old. If so, subsitutue out Cheney and put in your Math teacher's name. Bush? Biology. Rumsfled? Oh he's the gym teacher.)

Donald Rumsfeld needs to wear iced underwear because of some medical condition, and he has his secret service detail hold his spares. He was recently getting uncontrollable long-term erections and had to change up his medical treatments. The underwear and the erections is why he uses a standing desk, not because he is some super-man. He also wears nylon stockings, not because he's gay, but to control some vascular problem with his legs which causes him intense pain.

President Bush, when dining at the white-house, does not eat any item of food which has not been first sniffed by a trained dog before being prepared. Think about that.

Word among the staff is that Cheney was drunk when he shot that lawyer, and secluded himself for a day to sober up and avoid felony firearms charges. I don’t have any direct information on this because the guys with him at the time are not talking. This is totally unconfirmed, but I think it is plausible.

There's not really a doubt in my mind that at least some of the factinos are true, but (shrugs) who really gives a rat's ass if Cheney's breath is bad.


Dick Cheney has chronic gum problems and his breath smells like shit as a result. He is also a CLOSE TALKER. He keeps a small bottle of diluted hydrogen peroxide which he rinses with every hour on the hour, and he swallows it instead of spitting. He also picks his nose vigorously (violently) and hums loudly and tunelessly to himself while taking shits.

And, most creepy...

The white house lawn is mowed every other day by the same man humming the same tune.

ahhhh!! And if you say Condi Rice three times in front of the mirror and step backward, she will appear and bite your head off with her horrible alien matnis head!


Kos also repeats this, along with comments from SA, but has the taste to refrain from piling on.
Mostly.

Churched!

Finally, I have been properly churched.

Yeah, I know I've blogged about the FSM before, but reading the hate mail it's generated really got my spirits up. Why? It sort of points out that he's on to something. If real, mainstream Christians can have their beliefs so rattled by a plate of pasta, it tells me they strongly suspect their gods are not as real as they say. Anyone with an ounce of sense would see through this and recognize it as a joke, but these folks are clearly threatened and hostile about it.

Good.

The more they argue the FSM is a threat to their religion, the higher the chance they will be recognized as extremist fools.

Count me amoung the FSM faithful! The Flying Spaghetti Monster, a god we can all agree isn't real.

Papists and Muslims and Quakers, oh my!

I love maps! When I was in 4th grade I got sent home with a note which read,
"Buy Mark a globe so we can have the class' back". I was spending hours with it, looking at foriegn contries, learning cities and countries, etc. It was completely compelling.

Even today I have MS MapPoint on all my computers and have been know to spend an hour or two going over the geography of a country I haven't been to before (or in many cases some I have). I just love them.

Here's a great site mapping demographic data on religion across the country. I was a little surprised that a) the country isn't as religious as I thought and b) Massachusetts is still very religious.
Enjoy

Book Review: Accelerando

Title: Accelerando
Author: Charles Stross
Grade: F-
Summary: Unreadable

I'm no real fan of the Singularity, but Charles Stross has written a number of pretty good stories around it, so I was looking forward to a good book. Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise are both excellent, so I figured this would be pretty good.

I could not get past page 40 in this. My current operating theories for this disconnect is that a) he's had a massive stroke, b) he lost the draft in a hard drive crash and had to rewrite the entire thing from scratch in an entire night, c) he won the Lotto and just doesn’t care any more or d) aliens ate his brain.

Its flaw was simple, it was logically inconsistent. Too many technological rabbits out of the same, tired hat, weird views of intellectual property, unrealistic views of human motivation and, what made it unreadable to me, too many A implies B errors. If technology B exists and logically depends on A, the effects of A must be seen in other places. In Stross' novel sentient AIs are common as pennies, depressingly so, yet none of them reach the critical point. Nope didn't buy it.

Doubtless many pro-singularity friends could read this and enjoy it and will probably take issue with my review. I'm not down on Stross who I still think is a good author, just this novel which I didn't like.like.

On Aging

Nothing makes you feel old like walking into a crowded schoolyard, screaming “Hey, can I play?!” at the top of your lungs, and being led away by policemen.

Sing it Brother!

More here.

Happy Lucky Fun Delicious Anime

Keeping my promise to blog less with higher quality



More here

Gonorrhea Lectim

From field corespondant Tara:

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a warning about a
new virulent strain of a sexually transmitted disease. The disease is
contracted through dangerous and high risk behavior.
The disease is called Gonorrhea Lectim and pronounced "gonna re-elect him."
Many victims contracted it in 2004, after having been screwed for the past
four years.
Cognitive characteristics of individuals infected include: anti-social
personality disorders; delusions of grandeur with messianic overtones;
extreme cognitive dissonance; inability to incorporate new information;
pronounced xenophobia and paranoia; inability to accept responsibility for
own actions; cowardice masked by misplaced bravado; uncontrolled facial
smirking; ignorance of geography and history; tendencies towards evangelical
theocracy; categorical all-or-nothing behavior;
Naturalists and epidemiologists are amazed at how this destructive Disease
originated only a few years ago from a bush found in Texas.

Medical Update

Good News Column:
Genetic Testing: A-ok! Nothing like Huntington's, Cerebreal Ataxia, CAG-repition disorders etc.

Neutral News Column:
The MS doctors seem to think it's a complication of diabetes
The Diabetes doctors think the MS doctors are crazy.
The Chief Neurologist at UW thinks the MS doctors are crazy as well

Bad News column:
My GP found how to get leg reflexes, by involving part of my brain in something else. This is good news becuase it means my peripheral nerves are probably good. This is bad news because, "well, it means the problem's in your brain Mark"
I seem to be now be exhibiting the Babinski Reflex. This is new and also points to brain involvement.

Some Kinda Metaphor or Something

I love Bob the Angry Flower. I wonder what the author is trying to say...

Not Dead! Back from Hiatus

Howdy all,

Thanks for all the notes. No, I am not dead or even especially sick. Just busy with work and a new, completely unproductive hobby.

While all blogs are completely narcissistic enterprises, I decided that mine was getting an increasingly negative, whiney tone to it, i.e. complaints about this and that, rants about news articles, complete and total meaningless trivia etc. Not interesting, not fun and bordering on the anti-social. It's easy to descend into a cozy world of self-reinforcing diatribes and cranky rhetoric when your friends agree with you and, before you know it, you're well down the road to being a crazy shut-in with 5 friends and a lot of cats (or dogs, fish, chinchillas etc.)

So I took a break, got my head out of that, and now am thinking about trying again. This time with the view that things should be lighter and less self-involved.

So, from here forward, look for fewer but hopefully more entertaining posts.

A Strongly Worded Denial

Thaurloteion: hi
Toast171: hi
Thaurloteion: how are you/
Toast171: I'm okay. How are you? Getting ready for classes tomorrow?
Thaurloteion: good
Thaurloteion: not really, i'll do that tomorrow when the store is open
Thaurloteion: trying to find out where my classes are
Thaurloteion: but that service is down for maintenance
Toast171: they are at Drexel
Thaurloteion: thank you
Thaurloteion: i didnt realize that
Toast171: anytime son
Thaurloteion: what are you up to today?
Toast171: house hunting
Toast171: I'm gonna bag me a house!
Toast171: first tho, I need to bait the traps
Thaurloteion: bait the traps?
Thaurloteion: those are rats, not houses
Thaurloteion: you cant live in them
Toast171: I can't?
Toast171: Ratman does!
Thaurloteion: are you ratman?
Toast171: And those guys who talk a lot on the streets
Thaurloteion: those are bums
Thaurloteion: they live in boxes
Thaurloteion: or sleeping bags
Toast171: No! I am not Ratman! Who told you that??!! I deny it!
Thaurloteion: no one told me
Toast171: How could they? It isn't true! It isn't! WHo is spreading these lies?
Toast171: The rats will know! Oh yes, you can keep your secrets from humans, sure, but not the rats! The lovely, silky coated, bright eyed rats. They see all. They know!
Toast171: errr....
Thaurloteion: yes.....
Toast171: ... they know... that I am not the Ratman! Thats what they know!
Toast171: ask them!
Thaurloteion: of course...
Toast171: right now!
Toast171: go go go!
Thaurloteion: i'll do it later
Toast171: ok
Toast171: Good
Toast171: But don't ask Willard
Toast171: He's a liar
Toast171: and a rat bastard
Toast171: whatever you do, dont talk to Willard
Toast171: and if you do, don't beleive what he says
Toast171: and I *certainly* don't owe him any money! He cheats at cards...
Toast171: ...
Toast171: ...eerrr..
Toast171: I'm not Ratman
Thaurloteion: no
Thaurloteion: of course you're not
Toast171: whew!
Toast171: (that went smoooothly)

On the Plus Side, They Aren't Actually Burning Buildings

... except perhaps a few of "those" churches in the South. On the other hand, they do vote, which is at least as devistating:

From Fundie's Say The Darndest Things



Average rating: 3.62Rated 13 times.

"DURING THE TIME WHEN ISRAEL - GOD'S CHOOSEN PEOPLE - were backslidden, HE [GOD] raised up Wicked Rullers, TO CHASTEN HIS OWN! SO it is today! God has given us a respite, with BUSH - but remember the Agenda of the ENEMY! HILLARY CLINTON - Hopes to be the Next President of the USA! UNLESS - CHRISTIANS - CRY OUT IN REPENTANCE FOR OUR SINS, AND FAILURE TO OBEY GOD, She will BE IT!"

Which Superhero Are You?

Here

I was surprised at the answer I got although I tried to answer honestly. Given the type of hero I play well in City of Heros, I expected to get "The Flash".

Your results:
You are Superman

Superman 80% Spider-Man 75% Iron Man 65% Supergirl 62% The Flash 60% Robin 57% Hulk 55% Green Lantern 50% Wonder Woman 47% Batman 45% Catwoman 35%

You are mild-mannered, good, strong and you love to help others.

Click here to take the "Which Superhero am I?" quiz...

Note to Atheists: Morality Comes Only From God, Stop Acting Moral!

A guy who missed the point of atheism:

One of my friends told me the other night that he had stopped to help a stranded motorist.
"Why would you do that?" I asked.
"Because it was the right thing to do. She needed help."
"But," I protested, "that doesn't make any sense. You wasted your time and efforts on a complete stranger, and for what? You got nothing out of it. You should have kept right on driving."
He gave me a puzzled look.
What I meant to say is that God is the basis for good and evil, and once you reject him and his rules, you're left with nothing but self-serving and self-preservation. In short, you're left with being your own god.

No. Atheists merely reject the idea that morality must be imposed by a mythical figure, we do not reject the idea that people must have morality for society to work. In fact, that’s the point. If you're only following a moral code because you're afraid you'll get caught by god (or more terrestrial authorities), while I'm glad your following the rules, don't expect me to respect you. What you're saying is that you are fundamentally untrustworthy without fear of punishment. Further, you probably believe that everyone else is the same way. Hence, god is needed everywhere, to watch all the time, to keep folks on the right path.
I believe people are capable of more, the right and wrong can be taught as core values and that fear of god is superfluous. I try to live up to my highest ideals and while I don't always succeed, I don’t think I fail more than the faithful, and I know that the consequences are mine to bear.

Not As Bad as the Hasselhoff Recursion

But almost, almost as bad.

An Accidental Nuke

I haven't worked this out, or the possible yeild, but it's at least remotely possible.

Finally!

I finally got an email asking me to transfer millions out of Zimbabwe. Soon all of Africa will by under My control! (note, it came with the following spacing. One big block of text)


Subject:
Assistance From You
Date:
2/4/2006 5:57:00 P.M. Pacific Standard Time
From:
kz@netscape.net
Reply To:
karongaz@netscape.net
To:
toast171@aol.com

Dear One, My name is Master Karonga Zungu, the son of Mr.Ellies Karonga of blessed memory from Zimbabwe, During the current crises against the farmers in Zimbabwe from the supports of President Robert Mugabe to claim all citizens both black/white farmers farms, who where not his party members and his followers, he ordered all white/black farmers who were not in his party to surrender all their farms to his party members and his followers. My father was one of the most successful multy farmers in our country and because he did not support Mugabe`s ideas, Mugabes supporters invaded his farm and burnt everything in the farm, killing him and made away with a lot of farming items in my fathers farm. Before his death, my father had deposited with banking firm in (Europe) the sum of (USD $12 MILLION) for buying of new farming materials.But I can't transfer it, to where i live becouse I'm an Asylum seeker,and not allowed to operate bank accounts, i want to go into arrangement by which i can live in your country and get my money back for benefitable investments. I have agreed to offer you 10% of the total sum for your assistance as soon as the money gets into your account also 5% has been set aside for all expences onece the money is cleard,any expences incured by you in the act of claiming this funds and making the transfer to your account will be deducted from the 5% before any other step is taken. I want truth and honest to be our watch word in this transaction and please treat this transaction with strictly confidential for the successful out come of it. All I want you to do is to furnish me with your personal full name as in your passport/private phone and fax numbers and also your private e-mail address if any for easy and urgent communication. Note:reply email karongaz@netscape.net Best regards,. Your brother in need. Karonga zungu

Table of Condiments That Periodically Go Bad

By Valence Shell

The ACME Catalog

All Gadgets, All the time!

From Dr. Nick

Seperation of Church and State

Interesting Quiz.

I got a 17

Where Smegma Comes from

WARNING: Put down all food, drinks and oral drugs before you read this.

Penultimate comment on the STOU Speech

From Pharyngula,

Did he say anything in that speech that was actually true? I'm beginning to suspect that if he started by saying, "My fellow Americans…," that it might be fruitful to check into the INS records and see if he actually is a citizen.

Snort!

We Slowly Become The Things We Despise Most

... well, only if we are intellectually lazy and guided by emotion rather than logic. While not perfect in this, I had to give up on many cherished political traditions I had when I was young, once I took an objective, non-emotional view of them. Unions, for example, were hard to give up on, but I have come to the conclusion, there days of usefulness are long, long past.

Here's what it looks like when judges and fine legal minds contort themselves to hang on their goals instead of their principles. It's a little long, but worth the investment:



Judge Richard Posner's comments in the New Republic on how he would go about deciding the constitutionality of the NSA surveillance program are refreshing for their honesty:

You [Professor Philip Heymann] say that "First we have to address ... the defiance of legislated prohibitions and the absence of published standards and any known system of accountability to the other branches." Why first? The way I approach a case as a judge--maybe you think it heresy--is first to ask myself what would be a reasonable, sensible result, as a lay person would understand it, and then, having answered that question, to ask whether that result is blocked by clear constitutional or statutory text, governing precedent, or any other conventional limitation on judicial discretion. That is how I would proceed if asked to decide a case challenging the legality of the NSA surveillance program. I would try to find out as much as I could about the program--its contribution to national security and the inroads it makes on liberty and privacy--before I started waxing indignant over it, and that indeed is what I have tried to do, and the result of that inquiry is my article. I missed such an inquiry in the letter to Congress you co-signed that was published in The New York Review of Books.

The ironies abound. If this is how defenders of the NSA program must proceed in order to argue for its legality, they well fit the caricature of judicial activism that generations of conservatives have tarred liberals with when liberals argue for extensions of civil rights and civil liberties protections. That is, instead of being constrained by law in the first instance, defenders argue that a program would be good policy and therefore strain to find that it is not illegal or unconstitutional.

Posner, however, is no ordinary conservative. He has long abandoned the belief that one must speak in pious platitudes about doing what the framers intended, or not legislating from the bench. He regards all this as mere blather designed to mystify what is really going on in legal decisionmaking. Instead, he views the judicial task "pragmatically," in his words, as an extension of ordinary policy discourse, which is only mildly constrained by legal texts and doctrines, if at all.

Posner's candor lays bare a jurisprudential problem for both sides of the ideological spectrum. Defenders of the President must come up with what I can only regard as makeweight legal arguments for justifying what he has done, arguments that would indeed require judges to legislate from the bench, if that hackneyed phrase has any meaning. (For those of who you want a detailed defense of that claim, I direct you to Marty's many posts on this site.)

Moreover, the muscular presidency that the Republican Party now promotes also has little connection to the original understanding of the President's power, despite Professor Yoo's valiant efforts to selectively quote sources to suggest that it is so. Rather, the best defense of expanded Presidential power is that the Constitution must keep up with the times, or as it is so often put, that "9-11 changed everything." That is to say, to justify their constitutional claims, defenders of the President must become that most dreaded and hated of liberal stereotypes, a bevy of living constitutionalists.

But lest liberals rejoice in this irony, it is worth noting that Posner's candor challenges them as well. Posner has dared critics of the President to abandon a debate about what the rule of law requires and concern themselves only with what the best policy is. To respond to this challenge, critics must rediscover and renew their faith in the rule of law-- in the importance of law as an institution that constrains arbitrary power even when that constraint also prevents *them* from doing what they think just and right.

Manimal

I have to admit, I shot soda through my nose when I read this:

President panders to anti-manimal lobby! Dr Moreau flees country in rage!

I didn't listen to the State of the Union Address last night, preferring to maintain my equanimity by attending a talk on quantum physics, but I knew I could trust my readers to email me with choice weird science bits. I'm getting a lot of "WTF?" email about this statement from Bush:
Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research, human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling or patenting human embryos.
It's pure political calculus. He throws away the mad scientist and pig-man vote, and wins the religious ignoramus vote…and we know which one has the majority here.

Update:

Server trial by fire

Now we'll really get to see how well this new server provided by Seed holds up. Pharyngula just get linked by Slashdot, and I've seen a thousand hits come roaring in in 5 minutes. My lovely old Mac G5 server would have been screaming and shaking at this point, and you wouldn't be reading this article, that's for sure.

The Communist Manifesto

err.. I mean the Discovery Institue Manifest.
Nice.

It reminds me a lot of those pamphlets I used to see the Campus Crusade For Communism hand out, i.e. it makes no actual sense but justifies an opinion some folks already have.

I'm sure a lawsuit is pending.

The Big Picture

... continues to be one of my favorite economic blogs.

This is an interesting piece on how economists are often "perplexed"

WSJ: "After the economy navigated a brutal hurricane season to post robust growth in the third quarter of 2005, growth cooled considerably in the fourth quarter. Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of U.S. economic output, increased at just a 1.1% seasonally adjusted annual rate as free-spending consumers became more cautious and the gaping trade deficit continued to provide a drag on the expansion. For all of 2005, GDP growth averaged a 3.5% annual rate. What does the slowdown in the fourth quarter mean for the economy in the months ahead?

Economists weigh in with their reactions:

"In both its overall appearance and underlying detail, the 1.1% fourth quarter growth in real GDP ranks as the most perplexing report in memory. At face value, such weakness would seem to make it more difficult for the Fed to tighten monetary policy again. But the underlying details reinforce -- if not increase -- perceptions that much faster growth lies ahead. Nonetheless, the confusing and conflicting contradictions with other data make it difficult to be confident in any inferences about the outlook."
-- David Resler and Gerald Zukowski, Nomura Securities International
* * *
"Consumer spending was actually a little better than expected, rising by 1.1% in the quarter vs. our forecast of +0.3%. I think more of the decline in auto sales was apportioned to the business sector (fleet sales) and less to the retail side than we expected. Housing posted a reasonable gain of 3.5%, but this was less than half of our assumed rise. The monthly source data pointed to a bigger gain, so this is a bit puzzling."
-- Stephen Stanley, RBS Greenwich Capital
* * *
"The consensus was a bit optimistic but this is a big surprise. The softness against our 2.6% forecast is explained by two components, fixed investment and government consumption. The former rose only 3.0%, with equipment and software up only 3.5%. This is baffling, given the 19.5% annualized leap in the value of capital goods production and the 14.9% rise in shipments of core nondefense capital goods. We expect big upward revisions."
-- Ian Shepherdson, High Frequency Economics
* * *
"While this was a disappointing report, there are signs of a very sharp rebound in GDP growth in the current quarter. First, much of the miss in fourth-quarter inventories is likely to spill over to the first quarter. Second, at least a partial rebound in defense appears likely. Finally, the ramp for consumption spending is even more favorable in the aftermath of the fourth quarter data. The bottom line is that we now see a very good possibility of 5%+ GDP growth in Q1 -- versus our prior estimate of +4.2%."
-- David Greenlaw and Ted Wieseman, Morgan Stanley

Liftport Art

I have long been fascinated by the idea of a skyhook, a platform in geosynchronous orbit at the equator with a cable/powered-lift-system/rope-ladder hanging down that can be used to reach orbit cheaply. IF the human race is actually going to leave the planet, AND there is no technologizable change in the physics of inertia, THEN we need a sky hook.

Liftport has a terrific gallery of what the platform migh tlook like.

Headline: People Make Poor Decisions!

Especially when it comes to politics:

Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects' brains were monitored while they pondered.
…
"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," … "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts."

Revenge Is A DIsh Best Served At High Volume

This is just beautiful. Read to the bottom for the payoff.

Right for the Wrong Reason

While I agree with his thesis, I think his arguement is actually wrong.

Fortunately some folks help out in the comments section.

The technical term for this phenomena is called "Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

A good rant on the physics of "go" verses the physics of "stop"

If anything, 4 wheel drive merely allows you to get yourself into more dangerous situations. We saw a Porsche 911 fishtailing all over the road. He was aware of his limitations in the snow and was going 30 mph. His torquey, rear wheel drive system had little in the way of traction in the snow -- and he knew it. He crept along in the right lane and still ran into some trouble. (On the other hand, I drove our rear wheel drive SLK home from White Plains Christmas Day 2002 in 6 inches of snow -- it took 3 and half hours versus the usual 60 minutes. I had no problem, but that's mostly because I am not an idiot.)

Now back to our 70 mph snow fools: In the event of loss of traction -- not too hard to imagine in 4 inches of snow -- you are merely a two ton hunk of steel sliding across a frictionless surface until you either regain directional control or run into some mass which stops you. Your Anti-Lock Brake System (ABS) is useless when your tires cannot make contact with the pavement. Modulating brake lock up when snowplaning on a 2 inch cushion of white stuff does you no good whatsoever. The technical term for this phenomena is called "Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

Evidently, There Really Is No God, Or At Least He Has A Sense Of Humor

This from FARK.

Wow.

Now THAT'S Blasphemy!

The Singularity (again)

Article by CertCo alum Frank Sudia posted over at KAI

If you worked for CertoCo and are scratching your head over who this is, I wouldn't be surprised. But if you were at Steptoe&Johnson or delt with the patents, then you know Frank.

Also, I must confess, despite the fact that I am not willing to take the existance of the singualrity as an obvious, forgone conclusion, I had thought of something very much like this.
That is to say me, and everyone else on the planet who has read David Brin's Earth.

Bumper Sticker == Serving In Iraq

That bastion of all that is right in Red State Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum:

“And yet we have brave men and women who are willing to step forward because they know what’s at stake. They’re willing to sacrifice their lives for this great country.
What I am asking all of you tonight, is not to put on a uniform. Put on a bumper sticker. Is it that much to ask? Is it that much to ask to step up and serve your country, to fight for what we believe in. To fight for the values that have made this the country the greatest count- we got her not because we were doing things really wrong, that our traditions and our morals were way out of whack, we got here because we were a good decent county. A country guided by divine Providence.
We will only stay that great country if we continue that fight. I’m asking ya to help me do that. God Bless you. Thank you.”

(via)

Where do people get ideas like this and why do they allow these people in public without their meds?

This pretty much sums it up for me.

If She is the Wonkette, is He...

the Wonker? Glenn Reynolds is subbing in for Ann Marie. Does he capture the irrepressible libidinal rauchieness that is the Wonkette and her charm?
You be the judge:

http://www.wonkette.com/politics//surprise-surprise-surpriiiise-150555.php

I'd say largely, yes!

How to Answer The Door

Here, although you have to read a bit to tget to the funny part.

The Temple got its name from an early commercial that my group, KU SOMA, shot for the college local-access TV station, to advertise our existance. The commercial was called "How to Answer the Door", and was made largely in reaction to a rash of door-to-door religion salespersons who had been causing quite a bit of amusement in our secular (read "lost") liberal town of Lawrence, Kansas.So we took advantage.

Cue the first shot, a standard old house in this town, with a cute front porch and a big white door. A narrator's voice booms, "How to answer the door, presented by KU SOMA."In the first scene, my girlfriend and I dressed up as a classic Southern Baptist televangelist and his dutiful wife. I hairsprayed my curls up into the most appalling bouffant hairdo I could manage, and held up a Bible to the spikey-haired SOMA chick, Becca, as she answered the door.

In my worst southern accent, I screamed at her, "DO YEW HAVE PRUH-TECK-SHUN FROM THE E-TURNAL FAHR!?" (Do you have protection from the eternal fire) In answer, she pulls back, grabs a fire extinguisher from beside the door, and blasts us with it. Let me tell you, THAT was fun to film!! As we throw up our hands amid the blast, the screen freeze-frames, and a red circle-with-slash graphic comes up over the scene, a buzzer sounds, and a voice admonishes, "NO!"

No! Bad Atheist! No Donut!

Centralia

Centralia PA made the news quite a bit in the late 70s and early 80s when I liven in Pennsylvania, famous fo rthe undergorund fire that had been burning for almost 20 years at that point.

It's good to know that, in the intervening 25 years the free market has finally solved the problem, the fires are out and land value in Centralia is on the rise.

Oh, wait a minute...

In 1983, there was fire under about 350 surface acres. By 1991, this area had been increased by about three-quarters. Worst case scenario would be about 3700 acres and possibly a hundred years. Finally 26 homes along Route 61 west of town were bought in April of 1991. There were no further plans to fight the fire. The population of Centralia as of 4/18/97 was 44 people and has dwindled since. There are just a few scattered homes today remaining in the town along with the borough hall. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania owns the remaining homes. The monetary value of each property is in escrow or tied up in the legal system. Until the remaining people move, the future of this town is unknown. The State is being very lenient at this time. The State owns the homes but the remaining people are still paying the property taxes on the houses.

Looks like neither the government nor the free markets have a workable solution here.

Jesus Quiz

I picked this up from Nick who got it from Travis.

I tried to answer honestly but many of the questions conflate 2 or more ideas making it hard to give a single answer that make sense.

My result:

You scored as Pelagianism. You are a Pelagian. You reject ideas about man's fallen human nature and believe that as a result we are able to fully obey God. You are the first Briton to contribute significantly to Christian thought, but you're still excommunicated in 417. Pelagianism 100% Donatism 100% Socinianism 67% Gnosticism 33% Docetism 33% Modalism 33% Nestorianism 33% Monarchianism 33% Apollanarian 33% Albigensianism 33% Adoptionist 0% Monophysitism 0% Chalcedon compliant 0% Arianism 0% Are you a heretic? created with QuizFarm.com

I note that there is no Atheist, Diest or Unbeleive category. This seems flawed but the framework of the test seems to presuppose belief.

The Picard Song

Quite hypnotic actually and a use of the Sims 2 I would not have thought of.

The Conservative Zappa

Frank Zappa strongly influenced my views around liberty and "conservatism".

Here is a terrific piece with him defending the conservativism from the religious right on Crossfire in 1986.

Here it is 20 years later and we've largely lost this battle. The religious advocate is spouting the same big government, anti-free market solutions which make the positions of the far left equally unworkable.

Watch it all, it's worth your time (plus it has a young Robert Novak)

Sci Fi News

Some good bits over at this week's Sci Fi Weekly:

Sci Fi Channel to air new Doctor Who:

SCI FI Channel announced Jan. 12 that it will air the first season of the BBC's hit SF series Doctor Who, starting in March. The 13 episodes, starring Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor and Billie Piper as Rose Tyler, will air as part of SCI FI Fridays at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

This is excellent news, as the new series is superlative.

Serenity Might Fly Again?

Loni Peristere, visual-effects supervisor for the SF movie Serenity, told SCI FI Wire that there's hope for future flights of the cast and crew of the movie, which just came out on DVD. Director Joss Whedon—who also created the canceled Fox TV show Firefly, on which the movie is based—expected that the movie might draw the low numbers it did in its theatrical release, Peristere said in an interview. But he added that the movie's sales on DVD, which came out on Dec. 20, are running neck-and-neck with the hit comedy Wedding Crashers, which bodes well for a possible Serenity sequel.

I've still never seen Firefly or Serenity, but I've stopped admitting that in public. Too many times my admitting of this lapse has been greeted with that slack-jawed, bug-eyed, lip-flapping, I-cant-believe-you-took-a-shit-in-the-confessional-and-now-I-have-to-go-in-there look I know so well.
I'll catch it on DVD.

OTOH, the Sci-Fi gods give with one hand and take with the other:

WB Nets Its Aquaman
After a three-month search, The WB has cast 28-year-old newcomer Will Toale as the star of its upcoming Aquaman series, created by Smallville producers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, Variety reported. The Florida-born Toale worked as a model before landing a supporting role in A Streetcar Named Desire at Broadway's Roundabout Theater alongside Natasha Richardson and John C. Reilly. Toale beat out 400 contenders in England, Australia, Canada and several U.S. cities, Gough told the trade paper. The pilot will shoot in March, probably in Miami. The series is expected to be a signature offering next fall for the network and Warner Brothers TV. In the show, the aquatic superhero will be Arthur Curry, who owns a dive shop.

They could do worse than casting the hottie that played Aquaboy in the Smallville episode, but the casting directors never listen to me...

The Two Precent Company

Got there following a thread leading to this, but overall it's a good site and now on my browser favorites list.

Someday, you may be robbed at gunpoint. If that happens, will you call out to Batman to help you?

Some others say: "Who knows what I might do in a time of extreme stress — maybe for a moment, Batman might seem like a good option." Our response here is to acknowledge that sometimes terror can overtake logic, but that in the end, when the stressful situation is over, it's important to return to your senses, and understand that there really is no Batman.

The Sandwich Strategy

A clever marketing strategy:

Branding pharmaceuticals to block generics

Interesting discussion today in the branding/positioning class about branding in the pharma industry.

We talked about how the patent on Prilosec (anti-heartburn) was expiring. It was selling for $3.95 per pill. Instead of accepting that generics would kill the market share of Prilosec, Pfizer pulled a marketing sandwich approach.

Prizer knew that the generics would sell at 61 cents each. Pfizer headed them off at the pass by releasing an over-the-counter version of Prilosec called Prilosec OTC and selling for 71 cents each. At the same time, Pfizer modified the formula/molecule, applied for a new patent, and released the new formula as Nexium, “The Purple Pill,” selling for $4.95 per pill. Prilosec users went to Nexium and paid the premium. And, the OTC version attracted new users and blocked the generics.

Basic marketing pricing strategy, but genius nonetheless.

So, Viagra will soon have a generic version to contend with. The generic name is mydixafloppin.


Yes, that was a long way to go for a short joke.

YAMOO

Which is an astrophysical term meaning, Yet Another Map Of Orion. Really weird things are going on in different parts of Orion, not the least of which is the Kleinmann-Lowe Object.

APOD has nice image today though.

Intellectual Property Rights

Hey! Oracle can't use this template, it's Microsoft's!!

For journalists covering Oracle..
2004-08-04: 34 flaws found in Oracle database software2004-09-03: US gov and sec firms warn of critical Oracle flaws2004-10-15: Oracle Warns of Critical Exploits2005-01-20: Oracle Patch Fixes 23 ‘Critical’ Vulnerabilities2005-10-19: Oracle fixes bugs with mega patch2006-01-18: Oracle fixes pile of bugs

In the interest of helping journalists cover Oracle.. perhaps they should just move to a templated form to save time?
—

Many of the flaws have been deemed critical by Oracle, meaning they are trivial to exploit, were likely discovered around 880 days ago, and are trivially abused by low to moderately skilled [HACKERS/ATTACKERS/CRACKERS]. Some of these flaws may be used in the next worm-of-the-week.

“[DULL_QUOTE_FROM_COMPANY_WHO_DISCOVERED_0_OF_THE_FLAWS]” security company [COMPANY] said yesterday as they upped their internet risk warning system number (IRWSN) to [ARBITRARY_NUMBER]. “This is another example of why our products will help protect customers who chose to deploy Oracle software” [ARBITRARY_CSO_NAME] stated.

“[BULLSHIT_QUOTE_ABOUT_PROACTIVE_SECURITY_FROM_ORACLE” countered Mary Ann Davidson, CSO at Oracle. “These hackers providing us with free security testing and showing their impatience after a mere 880 days are what causes problems. If these jackass criminals would stop being hackers, our products would not be broken into and our customers would stay safe!”

Oracle has been criticized for being slow to fix security flaws by everyone ranging from L0rD D1cKw4v3R to US-CERT to the Pope.

Well Said

I was looking at the blog of one of the commenters, Jake, and found this little gem:

Interestingly suicide, in many circumstanes, is still illegal. The government does not have the right to tell you whether you can take your own life. This is clear. Their interest in your life is also clear. The governement takes strong issue with taxpayers excusing themsleves from their duty to the state.

Remember?

I'm appalled at how many of these things I remember although, to be fair, it was all winding down and there was an air of nostoglia about them even then. Still, I have a pretty good memory of being 3,4 and 5 years old and no small subset of these were part of life...

metal ice cubes trays with levers
Mimeograph paper
Beanie and Cecil
Roller-skate keys
Cork pop guns
Drive ins
Studebakers (I don't really remember this one)
Candy cigarettes
Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water inside
Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles
Coffee shops with tableside jukeboxes
Black Jack, Clove, and Beemans chewing gum (nope)
Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
Newsreels before the movie (no)
P.F. Flyers
Telephone numbers with a word prefix...(Raymond 4-601).
Party lines
Peashooters
Howdy Doody(no, not even in reruns)
45 RPM records/78 RPM, too
Green Stamps
Hi-Fi's


Ugh! My life is a cliche!

A Late Christmas Gift

I received, to my complete surprise, a late christmas gift from my sister. A 35lb box of books, mostly related to stuff talked about in The DeVinci Code. I was pretty happy with the gift, and uncommonly proud of my sister for done the reseach to choose them.

But that wasn't the best part.

Tucked away in there was a framed picture, which at first I took to be a picture of her from our childhood. "I remember this, " I thought. "This was her picture from the house on Brookside Drive. Why would she send this one? That's odd..."

Then I noticed the hair was very slightly different, a little fuller than I remembered it, the cheekbones were slightly off, the smile slightly different and I realized...

"This is Alexa. Wow! Does she look like her mother! Wow!"

She is the spitting image of her mother. Ain't genetics keen!

2050

An interesting article on 2050 and why there is some cause for..., well I won't say optimism, I'll say, "a break from the relentless pessimism I usually associate with where I think we'll actually end up".

Thursday, officials released a five-volume coda to the UN's Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, an ambitious four-year attempt to explore the relationship between the environment and human development. Summary reports of the findings as they affected four international environmental treaties were released last year. These new volumes represent the detailed information that underpins the earlier reports.

I peeked at an advanced copy of this I got from a meeting in September. It's pretty good. I was a little dissappointed to find some of my Looking Backwards events had already been thought through.

By 2050, it estimates that the highly global approach - with liberal trade policies, and concerted efforts to reduce poverty, improve education and public health, yet respond reactively to environmental issues - could yield the lowest population growth and the highest economic growth. But the environmental scorecard would be mixed.

In a fragmented world that focuses largely on security and regional markets and takes a reactive approach to ecological problems, economic growth rates are the lowest and the population is the highest of the four pathways.

Two other paths, which place a greater emphasis on technology and a proactive approach to the environment, yield population growth rates somewhere in the middle, and economic growth rates that may be slow at first, but accelerate with time.


Of course, in 2050, some folks will be living in their asteroid harems, guarded by a benign super-intelligence and propelled there by magic (or at least physics that does require the use of calculus to understand). Why not trash the planet now? It's not like we'll have to live here or anything.

Warning: Euphemisms Ahead!

I haven't seen Brokeback Mountain yet, but becuase I haven't been living in an Afgan cave with Osama Bin Laden, Elvis and the Ghost of Christmas Past, I have a vauge idea of what it's about.

Appearently, it's all about candy.

It's on Brokeback Mountain that Jack and Ennis discover their mutual love of candy. Because candy is not something cowboys and "real men" normally get excited about, Ennis and Jack resist their urge for sweets, but after awhile, it gets the better of them. One night, Jack looks at Ennis and asks him if he likes fudge. Well, it turns out that Ennis loves fudge. In fact, they both love fudge so much that they're certain everyone they know would like fudge and they should send them some fudge, so the two of them spend a lot of time on Brokeback packing fudge. And not only do they discover they like regular fudge, but that fudge with nuts is excellent too!

Google cut to 'sell'

You knew this was going to happen. I only regret I sold at $400, not $450

It had to happen one day. An analyst said Google (GOOG, news, msgs) is too expensive.
Scott Devitt, analyst at Stifel, Nicolaus, cut the search-engine company to "sell" from "hold." The fact is that when you purchase a stock, you purchase a business, and Google's cash flow over the next three to five year can't justify the current price, Devitt told CNBC's "Squawk Box."
And it was Yahoo's poor results that indicated the turning point for Google, he said.
"When dealing with a cult stock you have to deal with a change in sentiment," Devitt said. "Yahoo's missed number is a leading indicator for change in online advertising."
Shares of Google sank 3.1% in midday trading.

Doctor Fun

Doctor Fun is still alive! He was one of the first humorists on the internet back in the Eldar Days (the Eldar Days were back when I was in grad school and most of you had never heard of this internet thingy).

I lost track of this about 10 years ago, so I'm pretty excited.

Enjoy!

Update: From the Doctor Fun FAQ

Is Doctor Fun the oldest comic on the Internet?
No. That would be "Where the Buffalo Roam" by Hans Bjordahl. "Where the Buffalo Roam" started in 1991, and had its own Usenet group long before Doctor Fun came along, and is still running on the web.

Was Doctor Fun the first cartoon on the World Wide Web?
There you go! You've got it - Doctor Fun was the first cartoon on the World Wide Web.
Here's the announcement from NCSA. (Of course, that link to the cartoon doesn't go anywhere now.)

100 Year Dow Jones Industrials Chart

Interesting, although there seems to be some arbitrariness to someof his time frames.

I won't comment on some of the logic he uses to ascribe events to causes, but it does show an interesting periodicty.

Why Do The Terrorists Hate Us?

Behold the Republican Vision for America

The angels are just over the top.

Writer: "Errr.. I don't remember there being angels in this..."
Director: "What do you mean?"
Writer: "Well, I didn't write them in. Where did they come from?"
Director:"Wha.. What do you mean? They came from Heaven!"
Writer:"... sigh... Why did they come from Heaven?"
Director:"??? What do you mean? They are angels! You can never have enough angels!"
Writer:" err... okay. But do they have to fly out of his ass?"
Director:"They aren't flying out of his ass, they are spreading the Spirit of America!"
Writer:"From his ass?"
Director:"From behind him. You don't know much about directing. Or Angels for that matter. Or maybe even America!"
Writer:" But I WROTE this song!"
Director:"without angels appearently. You some kind of atheist? You're a godless athesit aren't you?"
Writer:" no! I am a Unitarian"
Director:"An angel hating unitarian! I figured! I'm calling the FBI..."
Writer:"Fine keep the damn angels"
Director:"Great! Now we need to add in some 9-11 shots. That's so patriotic it will make people cry! Genius!"
Writer:" Why not just go for the jugular and film it with the whole series of 'Precious Moments' figurines being smashed by a gay Arab with the Koran? On a burning flag wrapped around an aborted fetus?"
Director: ... quiver... "ah.. ah.. I .. ..ah.. That's Brilli.."
Writer:"I'm outta here!"

Halstead-Reitan Battery

This was part of my neuropsych testing 2 weeks ago. I was calling it the Diamond Dogs test, but obviously it has a real name.

Ralph Reitan, one of Halstead's students, contributed to the battery by researching the tests' ability to identify neurological problems. In a remarkable study, Reitan diagnosed 8,000 patients using only their test results—without meeting the patients or knowing anything about their background.

Technically, it doesn't say they were correctly diagnosed...

A better decription of the session here.

Did Christ Exist?

This is an interesting (and quite legitimate) question. If you are, at this moment, feeling your blood pressure rise, thinking “this is stupid liberal guff” and getting ready to click away, I would ask you; why?

I have always thought the answer to this question, btw, was yes.

The other question, "Was Christ Divine?", would be more difficult to answer, but I have always thought the answer was "No", in part because I don't believe in divinity but mostly because I have a hard time believing that, even after 2000 years, Christ would let himself go like that.

Personally, so many of the elements of the Christ story resonated with my NDE that I have always believed he was a real, historic figure who had had a transformational experience and shared it with others.

OTOH, there is a lot of evidence that he was a creation, but together out of a blend of other mythological figures. The time between the death of Christ and the first books of the Bible is almost 300 years. Longer than the existence of the United States. Given that we can't consistently interpret the intent of the founders in the Constitution, I tend to doubt an oral tradition handed down over 300 years bears as much factual information as literalists and Catholics would have us believe

A new movie explores this topic. I plan to go see it this weekend and see what they consider to be evidence. So far I've never seen anything persuasive that said he didn't exist, but assuming something exists and looking for proof it doesn't is a logical fallacy.

More after I see the movie and

Thanks for reading this far down! :)

"his motive... remains unclear."

Read this clip to the bottom (I promise there is a payoff).

Sam Alito

I had a chance yesterday afternoon to listen to the Alito hearings on NPR. Now I have to say up front I didn't care a whit about Roberts and after listening to the Robert's hearings, I cared even less. I put him in the old tradition of just blindly confirming the president's choice, which I generally support (with the exception of Bork).

Ailto said some things that really bothered me and, this was a surprise. I expected not to care, especially after a long soliloquy by Sen. Graham about what a decent guy he is. I even cringed a little at Shumer's no-nonsense cross-exam.

OTOH, he's clearly lying about the CAP thing. He might not want to admit it, but he purposely put that on a job application knowing the political sympathies of his bosses and is now pretending not to remember anything about it. It's clearly a lie. I compare this to Ginsburg who, while a flawed candidate in a hostile Senate, stepped up and owned her words.

I'm not saying that Alito is a bigot, or misogynist or anything, I don't really know and am willing to take the word of the many people who wrote in on his behalf that he is not.

That's not the point.

The point is either, he's lying and I don't like government officials to start their careers with a lie, or he's a fool. And I don't think he's a fool.

Also, he is painting a picture of himself as someone who is a "pleaser", i.e. who will tailor his opinions (like CAP) to get a job. The only conclusion I can reach from the man's own defense is that he'll gladly say things he doesn't believe in to get a job.

While this is common, I expect a higher standard of ethics from a SCJ. I find I have gone from not caring to, very concerned.



(non-sequetor: I've composed a song about Sam sung to the tune of Mona Lisa. I will not list it here, but every time I hear his name I start to sing the damn thing)

NeuroPsych Results

I have been fearing this moment for a week. I almost blogged this morning about how nervous I was, but decided to wait and get the actual facts. The following reflects quotes from Dr. Mary Pepping at the UofW who ran my tests and interpreted the results. I’ll have my copy of them in about 2 weeks.

When I walked in, Dr. Pepping was smiling and extraordinarily friendly. “This,” I thought to myself, “bodes well. Unless she does that when she gives people bad news! Ut-oh!”

It turned out there was Good News/Bad News and the just ... unusual

Good News:
"These are phenomenal results. In 25 years I've never seen results this consistent in so many categories. Even in your lowest categories, you scored in the Superior range". There turned out to be one exception to this on the mental tests. Regardless, this is the nicest thing anyone has said to me in ages, at least about my mentation.

We went through each set of results, one-by-one. Ironically, some of the ones I thought I did the poorest on, I did very well. Generally at this end of the spectrum, they rate results in several categories according to how many standard deviations above the norm they are; normal, bright, very bright, superior and very superior (I know, it’s grammatically wrong to have a very superior category, but that’s what they use).

Digits: 9 forward, 7 backwards. Very Superior The average is 5 forward 4 back.
Word Pair Lists: Very Superior. 10 correct pairs in 4 tries on recall after 30 minutes. Average: 5 in 4 tries. I mentioned that I thought I blew this one. "No, it's designed to be unmemorizable. The word pairs were chosen to they have little or nor relationship to each other without you inventing you're own system. It's also interesting that you had no false positives, i.e. you didn't identify any words that weren't there when you were quizzed and got all 12."
Spatial Reasoning: Perfect scores.
Tactile and kinetic reasoning, 1 perfect score, 1 in the very superior range.
Mathematical reasoning: Almost perfect. "You made one error where, although you got the right answer, you didn't reduce the fraction far enough". damn!
Verbal fluency: Superior
Executive Tests (cards and the "diamond dogs" machine). Very Superior. "almost perfect". I was right about the meta-rule, but, "it's designed not to be detectable by the subject. It's unusual for you to have noticed it at all."
Abstract Reasoning: Very Superior
Determination and Mental energy (apparently some of the tests, like the "diamond dog" one, can test how hard you are actually trying to solve them): Very Superior.
MMPI-2: Normal personality (notes below)

Conclusion: "If you have a cognitive deficit, it's coming down from such a level that these tests can't detect it." My mind is fine, including to my surprise, my short term memory. My general IQ is "north of 160"

Bad News:
The neurology tests (finger movement, eye movement), were not as good. My right hand, which should be the stronger of the two, was noticeably weaker. "It looks like, in the absence of other factors affecting the peripheral nerves, that there is motor neuron damage". This supports the MS or ALS theories, but tends to reduce (but not eliminate) the Huntington’s/Cerebral Ataxia theory.

Unusual: My answers to the story questions and interpreting a to a set of general facts was, "not wrong, everything made sense, just not what we were expecting. You only got in the 50th percentile on the stories. Normal, but odd given the high scores everywhere else. It's the biggest factor bringing your IQ down" Down to the 4 sigma level that is. It's weird that I scored this low on the inference tests since I would have thought I would do well, being fairly based on intuition and inductive (vs. deductive) logic.

Personality: Normal, but “you are only a hair over the extrovert line. This gives you a flexible set of tools for dealing with different social situations." Psychosis, no. Sociopathy, no, Dissociative disorders, no, Neuroses, no. "There is some indication you are worried about your physical health and, while not nowhere near clinically depressed, this does seem to have you upset."

Duh!

"You have the kind of personality that generally handles stress well until, suddenly it doesn't, at which point you probably obsess or collapse." I tend to collapse. Ask any of my friends from grad school who watched me after my divorce. Definitely a non-linear collapse.

"You're generally self-critical, self-effacing and tend not to speak your mind even when you know others are wrong or misguided". True, at least the last part.

Conclusion: I'm doing okay cognitively. I was flattered by her closing remark, "I really have never seen scores this consistently high across so many domains. You should be prouder of yourself then you actually are."

awwww....

So it really is motor neurons and not something which will take my mind. I can't tell you how relieved I am.
And, the quotes are all real. I am flattered (and more than a little uncomfortable) by the results.

If I Were God

...
well, just absorb that for a second.

ok.

anyway, if I were, this is the kind of thing I would do more often.

Luciano Mares, 81, of Fort Sumner said he caught the mouse inside his house and wanted to get rid of it.
"I had some leaves burning outside, so I threw it in the fire, and the mouse was on fire and ran back at the house," Mares said from a motel room Saturday.
Village Fire Chief Juan Chavez said the burning mouse ran to just beneath a window, and the flames spread up from there and throughout the house.
No was hurt inside, but the home and everything in it was destroyed.
Unseasonably dry and windy conditions have charred more than 53,000 acres and destroyed 10 homes in southeastern New Mexico in recent weeks.
"I've seen numerous house fires," village Fire Department Capt. Jim Lyssy said, "but nothing as unique as this one."

Double points for the correct grammatical use of unique.

It's worth pointing out that, statistically, you (yes, you!) witness about 3 events of probability 1:1,000,000 a year of 10 seconds or less.

This Is About Where I Step Off the Train

It looks like a school in California is taking up the challenge of teaching ID as religion, and people are suing to stop it. I have to kind of step off here as I don't really have a huge problem with this. I definately have a problem with teaching pure religion-as-truth, and it seems they might be skirting the border here, but I don't see this as a science issue.

OTOH, I lot of ID opponents do. Here's a good example.

There is an old adage that good physicists become bad philosophers in there old age, but I really don't see this as a science issue here. ID is an idea and, in general, ideas don't get supressed well. The onyl cure for a bad idea is exposure. I think the left here is emulating the worst book-burning instincts of the right and trying to close down a concept. That never works. Bring it up, teach it as philosophy and I bet the majority of kids realize how silly it is despite their teachers pronouncements.

That said, I'm not *encouraging* this, but if that's how they want to spend their philosophy dollars, well... as the saying goes, "god love'em"

Superluminal

I was reading the AAS updates at the Bad Astronomy blog and came across this entry on Heim Quantum Theory for propulsion. I haven't read the paper yet, so I can't comment a curosry glance makes me highly skeptical.

Red Flags:
violates conventional conservation of momentum
proposes "new physics" which has not been observed yet
brings 2 new concepts in one paper (as opposed to the more traditional way of one breakthrough per paper)
new terms for new physics
renames existing terms or older physics
posits existance of parallel universe with covarient physics (2 assumptions there)


Ideas to which I am sympathetic:
quantized space

The basic idea is to create a vaccum pair with one partner having an interaction with baryonic matter and the other having a vanishingly small cross section for itneraction. This would have the net effect of transfering momentum to the baryons but leaving overall universal momentum seemingly conserved. It's a clever variation of Hawking Radiation, but it's not clear that any gravitophoton pair product would actually have this property. If it were true, I would expect to see something similar at higher energy with axion production which has not (to my knowledge) been observed.

Still, it's clever.


Update: I've read it twice now. A lot of the bits are correct on their own, I just don't know that they form a coherent framework. It's like a wall where each brick is solid, but upon closer inspection the wall is held together by vanilla frosting instead of mortor. There are a number of leaps between various ideas here, but I don't think it's overall correct.

It could be:
a) a sophisticated joke
b) a troll
c) the legitimate end product of a creative but slightly flawed piece of reasoning, each step moving a little further out on the branch of implausibilty
d) a paper written by a brilliant couple of guys at the end of a truely legendary bender.

Don't know. I'll read it again. I happen to have most of their references in my library and can check up on some of the middle pieces.

My hat's off to these boys. I may steal this bit for the propulsion mechanism in Looking Backwards. My ideas were a little along these lines, but nowhere near this detailed.

A First Time for Everything

Glenn Reynolds has an interesting debate on Polyamory on his site and I basically agree with his core point: the state really has no business in marriage. Yes there are welfare and support issues, but those are not actually marriage issues.


But why does any relationship produce an obligation on the part of the government to provide recognition or support? It's certainly true, as some other readers pointed out (and as Clayton's linked Mormon story reports) that some polygamous arrangements now are basically welfare scams. But that's a welfare issue, not a marriage issue.
Kurtz, on the other hand, says that Western marriage is based on "companionate love." I certainly hope so, but I wonder whether the cultural concern that he describes forms an adequate underpinning for legal requirements. (And wouldn't that, in itself, be an argument in favor of gay marriage, so long as it was based on companionate love?)

I'm a little surprised to be linking to Instapundit, mostly becuase I generally disagree with Glenn. However, I try not to consume only a steady diet of things I agree with, that leads to inflexibility and (occasionlly madness). Often that strategy is annoying or frustrating, but it does occasionally yeild little interesting nuggets.

They Call Him Goldfinger

The inspiration for the James Bond villian came from a really bad architect:

As he was a neighbour in Willow Road, author Ian Fleming's dislike of the design of the house (and the demolition of the previous Victorian properties) prompted him to name the James Bond adversary and villain Auric Goldfinger after Ernő. Goldfinger consulted his lawyers when the book was published in 1959 (which prompted Fleming to threaten to rename the character 'Goldprick') but eventually decided not to sue; Fleming's publishers agreed to pay his costs and gave him six free copies of the book. Goldfinger was a serious man and sometimes sacked his assistants if they were inappropriately jocular.

I don't really care for Ernő's buildings, but man, that's a grudge!
I've actully seen Goldfinger's Trellick tower. I was on the train from London to Reading and as we passed it by I remember thinking, "what kind of awful Cthuhulu mind would design that kind of beast. It's all wrong"

Now I know.

Also, there is a link between Goldfinger and the always regretable Boston City Hall (and presumably the UMass, Amherst campus as well).

Christianity, Greeks, and the Public Schools

From Geoff:

Heres an interesting question:

Why is Greek mythology permitted to be taught in schools and yet modern religions, especially Christianity are not. This isnt a "me too" arguement, I'm just curious. I can see Egyptian religion being discussed from a historical standpoint to give better insight to the culture thereof, as has been my experience. Greek mythology has been offered as its own course in many public high schools. Again I'm not looking to say "they can do it, we should be allowed to also", just curious.

Excellent question.

Christianity can be taught in schools in exactly the same way as Greek mythology can be taught, as part of a non-denominational program of social studies or comparative religion. That doesn't violate the First Amendment since the government body, the school, isn't advocating, establishing or endorsing a particular religion. The problem only comes when public funds are used for teaching religion as a true set of facts, i.e. proselytizing. That’s why there is such an uproar over creationism and intelligent design. The transparent goal there is to teach religion out of content as a set of truths.

Often you see a similar version of this argument about the 10 commandments or town nativity scenes, i.e. they are okay as part of a larger context but unconstitutional on their own.

BTW, I had an excellent social studies teacher in high school who made us study Islam and read the Koran in 11th grade. He seemed to think it would be important for us to be familiar with it in the future. We also studied the shit out of India including Buddhism, Hinduism and Confucism. It was done exactly this way and was extraordinarily help.

As a general rule, many Christians are insulted when you put their beliefs in the same context as Greek mythology and so schools just generally avoid the whole subject, much to the detriment of the students education. Christianity has a lot going for it as a religion and does pretty well when compared to others. The problem is that many Christians don’t know that, think comparative religions are a kind of meta-physical beauty contest and are a little afraid they’d lose. If I were religious and a Christian, I’d be a strong proponent of these kinds of classes, done in a fair and objective way.

What sparked this:Work boredom, a thread on somethingawful about what people have done at work, the word mythology, and me remembering a conversation with you where you referred to the Bible as "a book of myths"

The bible is a set of allegories, stories which are probably not true in detail but make a philosophical or moral point. Generally when I've had enough "even steven"-ing from a religious advocate (non-beleif is a kind of belief, science is a religion etc.) I'll point out out that the Bible is a book of myths and stories.

Don't be fooled though, myths are very powerful. Nothing can strengthen or weaken a people as quickly or as throughly as myth and I would argue it's at least as important as philosophy in understanding the history our the human race.

But, calling the Bible a "book of myths" is technially correct.

The best *kind* of correct!

Rapture Letter

One of the most common "even steven" arguments made by people of faith is that a lack of a belief of god is also an unprovable faith, i.e. you have have faith that he doesn't exist. This is shown to be a fallacy pretty simply because the postive and contrapositive reach the same same conclusion: believe in god-> faith, don't beleive in god-> faith. Everything is faith and there is no null hypothesis.
A Fallacy, and a pretty junior one.

OTOH, some folks, like to hedge their bets:

I especially like the Heaven is Hell line. It's got an armchair economist's logic to it.

In His Image

A god familiar to any Penn State fan:

Anyway, the real motivation was to point out the foolishness of thinking you won the big game because God was pulling for your team (if you can imagine the classic image of God sitting on his couch with a beer in one hand, a remote control in the other, and a bowl of popcorn in front of him yelling at Mrs. God to shut the hell up, there's less than two minutes left, and the Packers are driving down the field).

Note: The rest of the article isn't nearly this funny.